Betting on the house

In Las Vegas, the BLM puts cheap land on the table for affordable housing

Artist's rendering of the new affordable housing project
being built on former BLM land in Las Vegas

COURTESY NEVADA H.A.N.D.

On one side
of Harmon Avenue in Las Vegas, a manufactured home with burgundy
siding, rose-colored shag carpet and teal living-room walls waits
for a buyer to come up with its $64,000 asking price. The home is
part of the Jaycee Senior Mobile Home Park, an aging collection of
trailers that was started in the 1980s as a government-sponsored
affordable community.

Across the street, local agencies
have begun building what they hope will be the model for a new wave
of affordable housing in the Las Vegas Valley. When they're
finished next summer, the 103 units in the Harmon Pines Senior
Apartments complex will blend in with the other homes nearby -
beige stucco, red-tiled roofs, clusters of palm trees. But when the
builders broke ground on the five-acre parcel in March, their
shovels turned earth purchased from the Bureau of Land Management.
Instead of the $3 million appraised value, the buyers paid
$198,000, under a little-known legal provision that allows BLM land
to be sold at up to 95 percent discounts for affordable housing.

Las Vegas' population is booming. With an influx of
service-industry workers, swelling ranks of retirees, and the
closure of several mobile home parks, one of the city's top
concerns for the future is a lack of affordable housing. But
finding cheap land to build on is tricky, in part because the city
is hemmed in by federal land, from BLM holdings to an Air Force
base.

Harmon Pines is the first project to take advantage
of a unique provision in the Southern Nevada Public Lands
Management Act. Passed in 1998, the law expanded wilderness areas
and allowed the BLM to offload nearly 50,000 acres in and around
Las Vegas. But it also contained a little-noticed clause known as
7(b), which allows the BLM to sell discounted land to local
governments for low-income housing. Now, that provision is poised
to take off, with at least one other project in the works and the
possibility that it could become a model for other Western cities.
"It's a wonderful resource in the battle to build affordable
housing," says Mike Mullin, executive director of Nevada H.A.N.D.,
the nonprofit that is developing Harmon Pines.

Still,
critics say the affordable housing provision is just a slightly
more palatable piece of the original act, which encouraged
unfettered growth. "Special interests benefit," says Janine
Blaeloch, executive director of the Western Lands Project, a
watchdog organization that keeps an eye on federal land sales and
trades. "And Las Vegas gets all the land it needs to keep sprawling
across the desert."

The idea of
tapping federal land for affordable housing has been
around for some time. The Southern Nevada Regional Planning
Coalition has been pushing the idea for 15 years, but there was no
workable process for local governments to acquire the islands of
BLM land speckling the valley.

Finally, in 2006, the BLM
laid out the process for implementing 7(b), and Harmon Pines became
a test for those guidelines. Clark County and its partners - the
BLM and the Department of Housing and Urban Development - whittled
down the variables so they could see how the new procedure would
work. The county chose a seasoned affordable housing developer and
a test case - senior apartments in a neighborhood well-suited to
them - with minimal complications.

The county hopes that
Harmon Pines will become the model for thousands of other
affordable housing units around Las Vegas, and the BLM has roughly
1,200 acres in the valley set aside for future projects.
"Hopefully, once we get the first few pioneering projects out of
the way, we can develop more of an assembly line," Mullin says.

By the end of the year, the BLM expects to close on a
10-acre parcel for a 180-unit multi-family affordable development
called Arbor Pointe Apartments. But unlike Harmon Pines, which is
located just blocks from shopping and other facilities, Arbor
Pointe is out in the less-developed southwestern corner of the
valley, far from bus routes and jobs on the Strip and downtown.

This tendency for such sales to be on "the sprawling edge
of town" worries people like Jane Feldman, the co-chair for
conservation with the Southern Nevada Group of the Sierra Club.
While the location of Harmon Pines seems fairly logical to her,
Arbor Pointe's site seems like an odd choice. "There are no jobs.
There are no services. There's no public transit," she says. "And
you want to put low-income housing out there?"

But the
agencies involved are confident that since the area is growing,
jobs and other services will follow. "Development is happening,"
says Michelle Leiber, realty specialist in the BLM's Las Vegas
office. "If it wasn't going to be affordable housing, it would be a
casino or something else."

Las Vegas is not the only
Western city surrounded by public land - Grand Junction, Colo.,
Rock Springs, Wyo., and Kingman, Ariz., are just a few other
examples. For these communities, laws that help federal land change
hands would make sense, according to Douglas Bell, community
resources manager for Clark County. "(The southern Nevada law) set
up a process where every time you want a piece of land, you don't
have to go back to Congress," he says. "While this effort is
clearly related to Nevada and the BLM, this program could be used
in any area where there is a lot of federal land."

So
far, that's not happening. Even cities like St. George, Utah, and
Las Cruces, N.M., with their own bills that designate new
wilderness and facilitate land sales to make way for growth, are
not including affordable housing measures. That's probably because
those communities are much smaller, and although there may be
demand for affordable housing, it's not comparable to Las Vegas'
needs, according to Jeremy Garncarz of The Wilderness Society's
Wilderness Support Center.

With or without affordable
housing provisions, these bills worry Blaeloch, who believes that
the agencies already have the authority they need to trade and sell
small parcels for legitimate purposes. These blanket bills, she
contends, allow legislators to win spoils for their states and
encourage the federal government to dispose of large chunks of
public land that otherwise wouldn't make it through the agency's
process. Even affordable housing provisions, when they exist, irk
her. "It's hard to say something bad about affordable housing," she
says. "But most communities have to deal with that in their own way
- through impact fees from developers, for example. I don't think
everyone in the U.S. needs to help Las Vegas build affordable
housing."